A Message For US As a Species - Crystal's NDE

0:03 From the time that they pronounced me that was a good 45 minutes They cut my clothes and then they paddled my heart my heart stopped and I could see people screaming and crying But I didn't realize that was actually my physical body because I was somewhere else The only thing that I could feel if you can imagine Absolute love and peace there wasn't anything else to be felt. I was greeted by people I had known in the past I'm back home again. Incredibly safe and felt at home. Welcome. Welcome to Round Trip Death, everybody. We have a beautiful guest today, Crystal Cassidy, coming to us from San Francisco. My old stomping grounds. What's it like out there today? It's beautiful. It's like 72. Got a sunny day. Can't complain. Believe it or not Utah is the same today. Oh wow Yeah, lucky us Of course, we don't have any humidity. We don't have an ocean sitting there or anything else, but I'll keep my jealousy to myself Hey before we jump in to talking about your near -death experience and all kinds of other things Crystal just give us a little background on you. Who's crystal? Who's crystal? So that's a question I sit with often. So for me there's really kind of two sides to my coin that I've

1:36 tried to unite in a lot of ways. I grew up studying martial arts and at the age of 12 and it was a long love affair with that warriors yoga and meditation was a part of that practice and that training. And so it really led me to a deeper understanding of the mastery of the body and also of the mind. And so I was quite a martial arts nerd in a lot of ways. I was also a science nerd. So I studied biochem in college, worked in pharmaceutical development and eventually in cancer research and genomics, a diagnostic specifically. And so a very kind of analytical side to me as well. and grew up in Canada, the States. That's kind of the long story short.

2:27 As I meditated more and got deeper into that in my 20s, I had the Kundalini awakening before a near -death experience. Everything started to change for me in about 2011, 2012. And you have a cat named after a telescope. I do. I have a British shorthair cat. with those wild yellow eyes and his name's Hubble after the telescope and he's quite a guide and teacher of mine actually and also a menace. I wanted to see him but you made him disappear a little bit too fast. I did. He likes to get very active right when we hit record. He loves it. Of course, of course. Everything wants to hold us up in our progress here. Well, I know very little about your experience. So this is going to be interesting hearing it for the first time here Why don't you just give us an idea? This was what back in 2020? 2020 you can guess what was going on at the time I would say my near -death experience or if you want to call it a severe illness out of body However, you want to label it has some unique elements to it. So I'll just preface it with with that do with it what you will. So for me, I started having premonitions of my experience before it happened, which I didn't really realize what that was until in retrospect. But I was in a meditation teacher training in that January,

3:58 and I started to to see something coming. I saw Death destruction. It wasn't my usual meditation experience and so I was I was pretty thrown off about it to To the point to where I'm not a painter really the visual artist of any kind But I started to paint it because it really just struck me in such a way I could feel something coming in and I also worked in biotech So I started to hear rumors of a virus moving around the globe And I already knew deep in my bones that it was going to be a part of my experience. And so as I got sick, and as soon as I started feeling sick, I cried. I had a breakdown on my bed because I knew it was karmic. I could feel that. I knew it was going to be difficult. I could feel that as well. And so I was almost grieving before anything had happened, which was a very odd experience.

4:57 And I haven't really had that since. I got sicker and sicker and luckily had some amazing friends in the medical field. So I kind of got some heads up that when you start getting cytokine storms and what those are is when your immune system starts to attack your body along with the virus. So it starts to compound on itself. And so when I felt in my lungs, this heat, It's like internal heat, like you're cooking from the inside. And then a coldness, and then a stiffness, like bricks were being laid in your lungs. I knew I was in trouble at that point. And if you remember back in March of 2020, that nobody really knew much.

5:46 We didn't know whether ibuprofen was gonna help or hurt you. And so in that context, I ended up in the hospital. I had to go into quarantine. I had to say goodbye to my husband, which is still to this day, the hardest thing I've ever had to do. And I was by myself in this experience, which was incredibly isolating. I could no longer rely on my analytical mind to crack the code and figure out the right course of action, nor could anyone around me either. So truly dancing with the unknown and Prior to this, I have had already have had out of body experiences. So as I got sicker, it's almost like your energy starts to come up in out. And so I was having these kind of in and out experiences of the body, because it was very painful and difficult to be in the body at that point. I was also and I can talk more about this as on the other side of it I was starting to perceive what I call a past life or you want to call it a simultaneous timeline and it was of a man in medieval times maybe and there was a war going on that he'd gone to war and I got a ton just really a high degree of detail about this lifetime that I was popping into for some reason. He had been injured in the war this was the first scene that I had seen in January was this scene of him at war.

7:14 And there was also a pandemic at the time in that timeline. And he had gone home to his family and everybody had perished unfortunately from the virus in that timeline. And for some reason to this day, I don't fully understand what I was experiencing now was affecting that and maybe vice versa. And so I would see kind of in and out of body like I'm looking down well it's like a 360 degree view but on his lifetime and I can come back to kind of how that resolves but it's very trippy you can also feel death nearby for those of you who've had these experiences you may know what I'm talking about it's a very somewhat surprising feeling of experiencing death and I'm talking about the energy of death and I could feel it I knew it was in my space and it's like an old friend showing up at your door unexpectedly there's a very weird familiarity and if you think about it it makes sense that we have that familiarity I knew that I had a choice I also knew that that choice wasn't just from my conscious mind there was something I was becoming aware of behind me I call it the higher self and there's more communication starting to happen. I could also, when I was out of the body, more clearly perceive

8:46 that this was a stepping off point in this lifetime, that it was an exit point. I had decided to stay, that I wasn't done yet. So I can bring you to this moment where I was in the hospital, I was in an incredible amount of pain. my nervous system was was failing. I couldn't walk anymore. I had a moment where I experienced surrender on a deeper level than I had ever experienced it before and it wasn't really a giving up. It was like a giving over and I fell back into life. Everything happened in an instant and it's really hard to describe but I do my best here and as that happened There was a call that came from beyond me, but it was also me, my higher self, and it was a call for support and help. It almost seemed like because I got out of my own way, I let go of the resistance to what I was experiencing, allowed that surrender, allowed that call for help to go out, and there was an instantaneous response. I call that response loving intelligence. It felt like to me because I was very connected and continue to be now to the yogic ascended masters. So it feels like to me there was some tie in there with Yogananda and I'm feeling a little twinkle there. So I think that's confirmation. But that intelligence

10:18 showed up and started to work on my energy body. And so, in my energy body outside of the body I could feel my first center you want to call it the root center light up and then the space between my eyes what would be between my eyes and then the heart space so it was like one two three bing bing bing and when that happened I landed back in my body and just sat in this surprisingly no pain and just basked in this kind of blissful receiving state for who knows how long eventually their pain returned but I I knew I knew at that point that there was help available and that I wasn't having to rely on my my own analytical mind to to save myself that I could give it over and that was from there a long journey of healing about a year to be able to do most normal things again And I had other experiences across time and space, but that's a pretty good introduction.

11:28 Okay. Well, I appreciate all that background. I'm just madly kind of writing down questions that I want you to fill in some blanks for me. But I think the first one is sort of an overall, where do we go with this kind of thing? Because a lot of people that come on the show will talk about Oh, I felt God's love or I felt like I was in heaven or some of those kinds of things. And you explained your experience very different than that. And this is a, by the way, this is a safe place where we're not saying one's right and one's wrong. Everybody is different and everybody's experience is different. So I appreciate hearing about yours and the differences that it has in a lot of what we hear here. With all of that said, let me get to a couple of things. You mentioned you had had some out -of -body experiences prior to this. Would you say this one was unique in some way? It was very different because of health -wise where you were at and what was going on with your body? Yeah, there are mechanics to it that are similar. Like I had already experienced in 2015 the oneness experience that you're talking about that people come out and outside of the body of the time space reality and experience that knowing of oneness, not just the belief of it. So I had already touched that in 2015.

13:00 So that was familiar to me, still experience that in this state of just being deeply, deeply seen, connected, understood, held, loved. in a deeply profound way that you then bring back with you to the best of your abilities. But I would say the difference at that point was that, how to put it, was that there was a, you could call it almost a more complete separation from the body in a way that I hadn't experienced before because of The the the illness and the physical pressures and that took a lot of energetic work to more fully bring my My consciousness all the way back down into the body which was which was quite the challenge in the time after that I didn't experience that before You're kind of pop out and pop back in this was different in that way. Yeah, you also mentioned what you called the energy of death Tell me what that is or what it feels like and how that affected this Yeah, it's It's something that I think probably people have felt in similar experiences and do Experience when we all ultimately make the transition and it's undeniable. There's something very prominent

14:32 about the energy very certain very Familiar which is what struck me the most I was not expecting that like oh, I've been here before I've experienced this transition. This is probably the one of the more familiar things in an incarnation to experience that felt not ominous or threatening just It's really hard to describe but you just you know it when you meet it. I hope that helps I Try not to ask easy questions Love it. I love it. You also talked about Sounded like you were sort of popping in and out from memories of a past life. You talked about the soldier Yeah, and I've heard a lot about past life regressions most people have and some of that kind of thing I don't know that I've ever had anyone in describing their NDE, talking about popping in and out of past lives. Am I describing it right? Is that how you look at it? Yeah, it is. And I haven't heard of any either, at least to this point, but it was fascinating. And I would get glimpses at different points in that lifetime. And I did.

15:51 I saw him very bitter. I saw him like a lost soul after being injured in the war and then coming back to having lost his entire family, he never recovered. The interesting thing about it is that as I went more through my experience, and especially once I started to get into the healing after it, and I was going real deep into my spiritual work, I was having to really excavate all of these patterns. You know, I was an athlete, so I was used to my body doing... Pretty much what I set my mind to do and then I couldn't go to the bathroom by myself So it was incredibly humbling and it required a deep dive into my own work and so as I was doing that his life started to change which I find fascinating and The last time I saw I saw him and I haven't seen him since it's probably about six months after the more intense part of the experience. And I was seeing him from above and I was looking down on this green field. And it was him and his new family. He had found community. He'd become kind of like a guide for the children of that community. And he looked up at me and he saw me and I still get chills. And for some reason, something was balanced between those

17:23 timelines. So do you feel like that was you the he was you? Mm -hmm. Yeah, I knew that to be true I just wanted it I just want to clarify and make sure and do you feel like the things that you were doing as far as your healing and especially the spiritual work you're talking about Do you think that affected him back then? I think so. Yeah, that was that was what I was Receiving from the experience. Yeah Okay I'm I'm picturing a few of our listeners right now with their minds just Exploding going. Oh, come on. I don't get that. I don't my pastor doesn't teach that and that's just fine. I Love it. Okay.

18:08 Okay. I've got more questions for you You talked about this intelligence that was responding to you. Tell me a little bit more about that What do you make of that? It's an all pervasive intelligence all -pervasive meaning, there are no parts of yourself that are not seen, understood, and acknowledged. You know, when we're talking and when most of us are in relationship in this realm, you're perceiving only a component, small component of who that being really is. And this intelligence goes through everything, can perceive all of it. and is completely non -judgmental, completely loving. It's not an emotional love. It is a remembrance of the connection of everything being acknowledged in you and through you. That's the best way that I can try to explain it. Can emotion be part of that? It is. It's not that it's not emotional, it's that an emotion lives a lot more in the physical form than it does in the beyond physical forms. You still have experience and emotion to a degree, but it's not quite the same as being in the physical body. It feels like the feeling

19:39 of it is pure acceptance. There isn't a mental processing. it's just in in immediate knowing everything happens all at once like that movie everywhere everything all at once and so it's really difficult sometimes for even me and my human crystal to wrap my mind around it because it's not bound by space and time okay so now let me ask you this part you're a scientist right scholastically and and in your career How does the analytical scientific side come into some kind of harmony with this side? Or are they at some kind of disharmony or dissonance? I don't think so anymore. I think that it's really starting to intertwine, especially right now, in a whole new way. I see really the worlds of science and what we call spirituality beyond the body experience starting to unite in really exciting ways. And I've been lucky enough to talk with some of the top minds right now in consciousness research, like MIT's Dr. Donald Hoffman. We're starting to understand that space time breaks down. We know this for a fact, that when you get to a small enough scale, high enough mass that the that space -time as we know it is not foundational and So theories on the science side that we're

21:11 applying that are within space -time to try and explain reality are always going to come up against a problem and so now what we're starting to do in the science world is look beyond space -time and starting to realize that if you read Stephen Hawking's last book he finally lands on the idea that we live in an emergent universe. And that all lines up with my own experiences of beyond body consciousness. And so I think that the old worlds and the Newtonian kind of orientation served us for a couple hundred years. but it's starting to reach its limits. It doesn't mean that gravity is not gravity. It doesn't mean that, you know, I'm not in this body right here right now and you're in yours where you are.

22:05 But there is a broader component to reality that we can then start to become aware of. I think it's going to become more harmonious in the years to come. So do you think science is going to adopt a lot of this or vice versa? Who's going to give? Who's going to come to the middle? I think both, you know, religion and a lot of spiritual traditions are right in many ways that humans are not limited to just this flesh. And then maybe the dogma kind of stops us. We don't have the rigor to evolve those teachings. evolve as we do our understanding of the universe. And then science, you know, has gotten a lot of things right and propelled us forward in a lot of ways.

22:55 And then also been limited by the orientation to materialism as the one and only foundation. And so I think I don't think it's one or the other. I think that it's both together have components. And I think the people who are really making progress. are the scientists that are speaking with spiritual leaders and the spiritual leaders that are speaking with scientists. I have a lot of near -death experiencers tell me that one of the things they learned during their experience was all about quantum mechanics and physics. Now they didn't remember a lot of it when they came back here, but they had a general understanding and then they could pick up a book. about string theory or something else in quantum physics and immediately fully understand it. Like it just all the memories flowed back of all this understanding.

23:50 I don't know that I have a question there but what do you think of that? I think it makes a lot of sense when you expand into those other realms of intelligence you can know things in a more multi -dimensional way. And it also makes sense to me that it can be difficult to then bring back that knowledge into this realm because then you're working with the analytical mind, which is a receiver of consciousness. That makes sense to me because there's been a lot of times when I've gone out and then I come back and I'm like, oh my gosh, how do I translate what I encountered or what I knew back down into the language of this realm? And so it makes sense to me that if they then find this language in a book or some other component that enables them to bring that knowledge into this realm in a way that is congruent, that makes a lot of sense to me.

24:51 And I've experienced that in places. You kind of have a deep recognition of what truth is, at least for you at the time. That makes a lot of sense to me. And it's not easy to put all this stuff into words. So maybe studying some of this science helps them do it because they kind of have this feeling of remembrance and then they're trying to figure out how to explain it. What did you mean by you landed back in your body? This is one of my things that I think is really entertaining is the adjectives that people use about coming back into their body. Tell me about landed. It's a good question. Nobody's asked me that before. Did you realize you said that, used that word? I, yeah, yeah. I used it in another experience too, that maybe I'll share, that kind of explains what I'm talking about.

25:45 So when I, years later, this was probably about a year ago, year and a half, I did a three hour, four hour meditation and got swept up in gratitude and love like a wave. and I say that I landed on this fire escape in my old apartment when I was recovering and I had finally been able to walk and sit down in a chair and look up at the sky and I had a moment of profound presence and knew I was going to be okay and I always wondered about that moment and then I realized it was me from the future really and I landed in my astral body on that fire escape and there's a transmission that happened between Myself recovering years ago and me having done all this this work to to recover and awaken Find my purpose and so it's it's yeah. I wonder why I use that word It's like a landing in space and time. So when you go beyond space and time You're in that realm.

26:50 I think it it feels like that's the best word to describe it when you're then back in the space time Context it's like, you know the ship comes in and you're you're getting off the The plank there or whatever when you land in a new back into a new area on the space -time Continuum and so I think that's why I use it Okay, it's amazing how many different ways People can describe what I'm just gonna call spiritual experiences. Okay, and that's a very broad term take that however you want. One of the questions I have for you is and especially for people of faith who maybe have lost a loved one or they're facing something in their life which we may refer to as a tragedy or end of life, what insights do you have for them that may help them feel more comfortable with all of this? Take away some of the fear that naturally as people we tend to have when we think about death I get this question a lot and I think it's one that as a culture we don't sit with and really confront have conversations around and Initiate ourselves into it's understandable that there is a lot of fear a lot of confusion and ultimately I say this a lot to I don't want people to necessarily take my word for it. My kind of purpose now or

28:25 mission is to give people tools that they can experience consciousness as the wholeness that they are on their own and find the answer these questions for themselves. We all have a different orientation or lens to perceive our experience with and ultimately that's going to be the most profound technology that you can start to access. That that's also part of my answer to this question because you don't have to wait for one of these severe experiences to Understand the beyond body beyond space -time experience if you dedicate yourself meditation is my tool for opening the aperture of mind and You can die before you die.

29:11 So to say you start to orient to the ego or the personality like human crystal here in a new ways. And it starts to serve you rather than you being victim to it. And so there's a lot of empowerment that can come from doing the work of consciousness. If you want to call that spiritual or you can also call it that. And so I think the best way to deal with that fear is to go into it and to ask what, what is that fear around? Is it i'm afraid to lose my sense of self and then the question is what is a sense of self who am i and you inevitably go down down down into that infinite onion that's the invitation i think and then once you start to experience yourself beyond the physical you know that you're an infinite player in this universe you start to perceive it not just from a standpoint of belief but from a standpoint of direct experience then the fear around death just dissolves because you understand what death is, which is only a transition and so many spiritual traditions talk about that. A transition from what to what? Transition from one space -time to no space -time and then from there wherever you want for infinity. Okay, all right. I know a lot of people are going to be interested in some of these tools that you talked about. Your website is soul, sorry, soulpodapp

30:42 .com. In case I didn't pronounce it well enough, it'll be in the show notes. You can just click on it. I love to leave people with some kind of a message of hope. And you've just done some of that already. But if there's a way that you can quantify that in a way that people of all kinds of cultures, beliefs, and everything can relate to, I'd love you to finish with that. I think the message for us as a species right now, from my vantage point, that we're all here for a very powerful reason, and that we as species, as humanity, are much more powerful than we are aware of. And so I see this time, this age, as an opportunity to realize that power in each individual, that that lies with you. and that you are infinitely capable and all these things that you're inspired by that you see in others or in your own imagination is accessible. And to start to really view ourselves as these powerful beings and creators to also experience that knowing of connectivity with all of us will start to make more harmonious decisions. as individuals and together. And then I'm very optimistic for the future in that context. All right. Thanks a lot, Crystal. Good talking to you. So good.

32:14 Thank you, Eric. Thanks again for listening and sharing this podcast. Don't forget to hit the follow or subscribe button and sign up for our newsletter at roundtripdesk .com. If you want to share your near -death experience, or if you have questions or comments about the show, send an email to eric at roundtripdeath .com. Until then, I wish you everything good that you're looking for in this life and the next.